MP Jérôme Guedj became the first Socialist to declare his candidacy for the 2027 French presidential election, announcing a run outside of a left-wing primary on Thursday, February 5. “There is space for a thunderous Socialist” voice, he told radio France Inter.
Guedj said he would refuse to participate in the primary that his party’s own leader and the Greens plan to organize on October 11, 2026. Socialist leader Olivier Faure is in favor of the primary and could even run in it, but the party has not yet made an official decision. Guedj called the planned primary “baroque.” “What is the policy direction? What is the clarity on values?” he asked.
Guedj, a specialist in social affairs, particularly issues relating to the elderly, is a longstanding figure of the Socialists’ left wing. He was among the rebel MPs who seriously complicated François Hollande’s presidency (2012-2017). In recent months, he supported a compromise with Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu on the 2026 budget bill.
He said he aimed to represent a “republican left” with “universalist” and “secular” values, resolutely apart from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical La France Insoumise (LFI) party. His announcement, he said, was precisely intended to “accelerate both work on the platform and strategic work” conducted by the non-LFI left.
Break with Mélenchon
Guedj was long close with Mélenchon, his erstwhile mentor, before their definitive break, sparked by Mélenchon’s reluctance to label Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack against Israel as “terrorist.” The two men had a first falling-out in 2008, when Mélenchon left the Socialists while Guedj remained. Guedj refused, in the June 2024 snap parliamentary elections, to run under the banner of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), an alliance between LFI, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists.
A year later, Guedj called Mélenchon an “antisemitic scumbag.” After Guedj’s announcement, LFI MP Thomas Portes called it a “Macronist candidacy.” Guedj, meanwhile, said he was keen to avoid “the worst scenario”: a runoff in 2027 between LFI and the far right.
When asked about competition with center-left MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, Guedj pointed out that Glucksmann was not a Socialist and had not yet announced his own candidacy. “I appreciate his clarity, but it is not illegitimate for the Socialists to assert their own identity,” he said, while wishing for them to “all work together” within “a collective framework” to ensure the left reaches the runoff of the 2027 presidential election.
